A study of Timorese communities that offers a human perspective on post-conflict reconciliation.

Violent conflict may end in a kind of peace. But reconciliation processes do not always work, let alone bring healing. How are families and communities to rebuild their lives when old divisions, pain, and memories still linger? Centering on social repair, this beautifully crafted study explores how families and communities in Timor-Leste and exile communities in Indonesia live with the enduring consequences of political violence, forced separation, and displacement after twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation.

Following relationships across borders and between generations, Boundaries of Repair shows how ruptures in kinship and community life reverberate across time and space, and even between the living and the dead. Rather than treating repair as a state-driven undertaking, the book reveals social repair as an uneven, fragile, and ongoing process, sustained through everyday care practices, memory work, emotional labor, and creative acts of negotiation in contexts marked by impunity and unresolved loss.

By foregrounding what it means to live with damage that cannot be fully repaired, the book challenges dominant assumptions about justice, healing, and closure. It offers a powerful account of how people renegotiate relationships, boundaries, and belonging amid traces of violence, contributing new insights to debates on post-conflict recovery, memory, displacement, and the limits of reconciliation.

Victoria Sakti is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research explores memory, care, and mobility in contexts shaped by political violence and displacement. She is a researcher and fellow at the University of Münster.

List of Figures
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Language and Translation
Abbreviations

Introduction: Along the Boundaries of Repair
Chapter 1: A Luta Kontinua: Collective Memory Making
Chapter 2: Ruptures, Bad Death, and Thinking Too Much
Chapter 3: Life and Death in Times of Peace
Chapter 4: Border, Mobility, and the Emotional Work of Repair
Chapter 5: Care as Repair, Time as Exile
Epilogue: Bonds and Boundaries After Political Violence

Selected Glossary
Bibliography
Index